Loni and Albert Harder

Loni and Albert Harder sheltered in their house in Palmnicken, a major amber-extracting and processing center (today known as Yantarny) on the Baltic, three Jewish women—Zelina Moshkowitz-Manielewitz, Miriam Zweig, and Genia Weinberg—who had escaped from one of the worst death marches initiated by the Nazis in the last phase of the war. Thousands of concentration-camp inmates—mostly women prisoners—who had been marched on foot in the dead of winter all the way from the Königsberg region, were mass-murdered on the Baltic shore on the night of January  31, 1945.

The Harders took the three young women into their home.  They tended their wounds, fed them, and cared for them as if they were their children until the entry of the Russians on April 15, 1945. The risk involved was all the greater because of the presence of Nazi neighbors who threatened to denounce them to the authorities.

Mr. Harder died shortly after the war.  His wife moved to West Germany, where she lived in DP camps in Bavaria together with her former protégés.

On November 29, 1966, Yad Vashem decided to recognize Loni and Albert (posthumously) Harder as Righteous Among the Nations.